Software RAID guidance

[David Robillard]

Robert Fitzpatrick wrote:

>I have an old NT4 PIII here that has a pair Adaptec Array1000 Family
>controllers with 2 pairs of identical drives on one of them (2 IBM 9GB
>and 2 Seagate 35GB). From what I googled, *nix does not support the
>controller, so I have removed the RAID arrays and loaded FreeBSD 6.0
>onto the two IBM drives. Now, I wanted to mirror the other two for data
>and looking for guidance as to whether it is first of all suited for
>software RAID and if so, CCD or vinum. I am contemplating vinum because
>the handbook mentions CCD is when cost is the important factor and for
>me, is reliability. What would someone suggest? If vinum, one thing I
>don't quite understand is do I create the partitions to be used in the
>device? There doesn't seem to be a man for gvinum and the link to it in
>the handbook section 19.6.1 is broken.

Hi Robert,

I use gmirror(8) to setup RAID 1 volumes. I've used it successfully
with IDE, SCSI and SATA drives. It is very simple to setup and
administration is easy. If you only need RAID 1, then you should try
it out. Should you need RAID 5 and/or a fully fledged volume manager,
then vinum is the way.

I also wrote a document on gmirror(8) setup. If you're interested, I
can share it with you.

David

FYI: man page URLs

gmirror(8)
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=gmirror&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+6.0-RELEASE+and+Ports&format=html

vinum(4)
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=vinum&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+6.0-RELEASE+and+Ports&format=html

--
David Robillard
UNIX systems administrator, CISSP
Montreal: +1 514 966 0122